Anime's cultural nationalism: The politics of representing Japan in Summer Wars (Hosoda Mamoru, 2009)

Anime has a long and varied history of engagement with the national. This article investigates how different forms of nationalism inflected Hosoda Mamoru’s Summer Wars (2009). Rather than focusing on extreme representations of nationalism such as propaganda, this article demonstrates how everyday or banal forms of nationalism also work to construct the nation. The release of Summer Wars coincided with a notable moment of turmoil within Japan’s political firmament, and so the film’s engagement with nation-alism is examined in order to understand how Japanese media negotiate such political upheavals, and the role that nationalism plays in such negotiations. The article considers a range of representations, from the films uses of Japanese history through to its discourse on online technologies in order to better understand how anime contains and refracts nationalism.